This past week Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) sold their 10 billionth song on iTunes. The 10 billionth customer was Louie Sulcer of Woodstock, Georgia. Given the milestone, Steve Jobs decided to reach out to Sulcer through a phone call. “He called me and said, ‘This is Steve Jobs from Apple.’ I said, ‘Yeah right,’ ” said Sulcer in an interview with Rolling Stone. “I have a son that loves to play tricks and he does that every now and then — calls me and imitates somebody.”
Sulcer’s caller ID said Apple on it and he had no idea that there was a contest taking place on iTunes. The 10 billionth customer would be given a $10,000 iTunes gift card. The 10 billionth song to be downloaded was “Guess Things Happen That Way” by Johnny Cash. [Rolling Stone]
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) will be celebrating a major milestone today. The company will announce that over 10 billion songs will be sold on their iTunes software. The consumer responsible for the 10 billionth downloaded song will receive a $10,000 gift card where they can buy more apps, songs, podcasts, books, movies, or TV shows from iTunes. [Apple]
Happy Friday everybody. Today is February 5, 2010 and below is the Pulse2 News Roundup. We are going to talk about Facebook, Apple, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Sony, Jersey Shore, Google Earth, FriendFinder, TechCrunch, Patrick Stewart, Jon Stewart, and Bill O’Reilly today.
Facebook 400 Million and Project Titan
Facebook is working on overhauling their message system in order to replace it with a web mailing system. The code name for the project is Project Titan [TechCrunch]. Facebook has also turned 6 years old this week and has reached the 400 million user milestone. [Mashable]
Location Based Apple Ads and iTunes Web Browser
Apple has notified App Store developers that they will be prohibited from using location based advertisements for their applications. “If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store,” Apple said [MacNN]. You can now browse the App Store on the web [PCWorld].
Snoop Vader
Rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg was caught in the middle of an imperial march walking around SoHo New York. It looks like Snoop has crossed over to the dark side since he is walking right next to Darth Vader. [HuffPo]
Sony Profits
Sony announced yesterday that they have returned to profit during the last three months of 2009. As a result, the company raised their outlook. [New York Times]
Snooki Crasher
A new meme has hit the Internet thanks to Jersey Shore character Nicole “Snooki” Pilozzi. The meme is called Snooki Crasher and it features images of Snooki in places where she doesn’t belong. Below are a couple of examples. [URLesque]
World War II on Google Earth
Images of World War II destruction have been uploaded to Google Earth. The cities where the images were uploaded include Berlin, Bordeaux, Hamburg, Cologne and Dresden. [Telegraph]
FriendFinder Cancels IPO
The FriendFinder Network filed for an IPO about a month ago. The FriendFinder Network is a brand that oversees porn websites and social networks. The company was supposed to start trading this week, but they have cancelled due to “market conditions.” [AllThingsD]
TC Intern Fired
TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington apologized to his readers on behalf of an intern that accepted a MacBook as compensation for writing a blog post. The intern was fired and every blog post he wrote was deleted. “I apologize to each one of you. I promise that we will always maintain complete transparency with you on how we operate, even when it isn’t such an easy thing to do,” stated Arrington in his apology. [TechCrunch]
Patrick Stewart on Twitter
Patrick Stewart, the Star Trek Captain Jean-Luc Picard, calls his mobile phone “my beautiful iPhone.” But he doesn’t quite understand Twitter and is has a fear of getting addicted to gaming. “To reduce life to–how many? 140? Just seems to me to be a little bit simplistic. Maybe I like complexity and abstraction too much.” [HuffPo]. And if you’re a fan of Patrick Stewart, check out a project that my friend Mo Kakwan made at Yahoo! Hack Day a few years ago.
Bill O’Reilly vs. Jon Stewart
Comedy Central news host Jon Stewart was a guest on FOX host Bill O’Reilly’s TV show earlier this week. The debate between Stewart and O’Reilly attracted 4,091,000 viewers. And about 1,041,000 of those viewers were aged between 25 and 54. [BusinessInsider]
Apple iTunes is one of the biggest source of music sales today. Accessing the content on Apple iTunes was officially exclusive to the software that is required for download. But now the walled garden company quietly rolled iTunes music, movies, music videos, and TV episode descriptions to the web in a new feature called iTunes Charts.
iTunes Charts is not exactly the same content that is showed on the desktop software but rankings are being shown for the various categories. On the web you can browse the top 100 in each category.
The problem with iTunes Charts on the web is that you cannot preview audio clips or buy the track on the spot. You still need the desktop software for that.
Around April 2008 Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) passed Wal-Mart as the #1 music retailer in the U.S. Now Apple controls 25% of all music sales through iTunes. Compact discs have 65% of all music sales. The remain 10% is other digital music sources.
In the first half of 2009, Apple had a 69% share of all digital music sales and Amazon.com had about 8%. ”The growth of legal digital music downloads, and Apple’s success in holding that market, has increased iTunes’s overall strength in the retail music category,” stated NPD Group entertainment industry analyst Russ Crupnick.
In terms of the CD market share, Wal-Mart has about 20% of the total market while Amazon.com and Target has about 10% each. Best Buy has 16% of the CD market share.
“Many people are surprised that the CD is still the dominant music delivery format, given the attention to digital music and the shrinking retail footprint for physical products,” added Crupnick. “But with digital music sales growing at 15 to 20 percent, and CDs falling by an equal proportion, digital music sales will nearly equal CD sales by the end of 2010.”
BoyGeniusReport heard a rumor that iTunes 9 will have some cool new features. For starters there will be Blu-ray support. iTunes 9 will supposedly have the ability to organize and arrange applications for your iPhone and iPod Touch. There is also supposedly going to be some sort of social network integration.
I believe it is inevitable that Apple will add Blu-Ray support to iTunes. Why? Because Apple is a member of the Blu-ray Disc Association consortium Board of Directors. Apple could really use work when it comes to arranging applications. As a matter of fact when I download applications on the phone and try to sync it with iTunes, there is a lot of struggling.
Currently there are about 2500 Blu-Ray titles available for purchase in the U.S., Canada, and Japan. Australia has about 1000 and the U.K. has about 1500.
On December 2, 1983 Michael Jackson released a 14 minute long music video for the song “Thriller.” The Thriller music video was directed by John Landis (Blues Brothers 2000, Beverly Hills Cop III, Coming to America, ¡Three Amigos!, National Lampoon’s Animal House, and An American Werewolf in London).
On June 25th Michael Jackson passed away and the world was shocked. In order to recapture their memories of the King of Pop, they watched the Thriller video on the Internet. The Thriller music video was watched over 8.5 million times since June 25th. Old Michael Jackson songs are almost among the most downloaded songs on iTunes as of right now.
On June 27th, about 1,500 inmates at CPDRC performed a tribute. The tribute was completed in 10 hours and features the songs “Ben,” “I’ll Be There,” and “We Are The World.” This video was watched almost 3 million times since being created 3 days ago.
Around the time that the Palm Pre launched, one of the features that was low key was the ability to sync with iTunes. This feature was major because the Palm Pre is supposed to be a major iPhone competitor. The fact that this feature did not appear in the limelight until close to the release date, it seems like Palm did not want Apple to prevent the feature from happening.
I can understand why because Tim Cook even indicated that they were willing to do anything in their power to prevent competitors from ripping off their intellectual property. ”We like competition–as long as our competitors don’t rip off our IP. And we’re going to go after anyone who does. I’m not talking about any particular company, but we are ready to suit up and go against anyone. We will not stand for having our IP ripped off, and we will use every weapon at our disposal….” stated Cook.
In the support area of the Apple website, an entry appeared about unsupported third party digital media players. Below is the text of the article:
Apple designs the hardware and software to provide seamless integration of the iPhone and iPod with iTunes, the iTunes Store, and tens of thousands of apps on the App Store. Apple is aware that some third-parties claim that their digital media players are able to sync with Apple software. However, Apple does not provide support for, or test for compatibility with, non-Apple digital media players and, because software changes over time, newer versions of Apple’s iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with non-Apple digital media players.
The Palm Pre may no longer have the ability to be synced with iTunes in the near future.
